Skip to main content

Shakespeare in the age of Brexit and Trump: the play’s still the thing

In his new book, Peter Conrad explains how the Bard’s plays are the perfect mirror for our troubled times

Next time you go to a Shakespeare play, don’t think you can settle back into a safe invisibility when the lights go down. You will be under observation: the actors we watch are in turn watching us, examining our personal flaws and the fault lines in our fractious society. We receive fair warning of the test that is in store. Hamlet invites a troupe of itinerant players to perform at Elsinore in the hope that they will embarrass and with luck incriminate his guilty uncle. Their purpose, he tells them, is to “hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” and expose “the very age and body of the time”.

It’s our age and body, our manners and manias, that Shakespeare’s plays now probe, perhaps more pointedly than ever before. The film-maker Errol Morris, introducing American Dharma, his sulphurous documentary about Trump’s ideologue Steve Bannon, recently remarked that we are suffering through a period resembling “bad Shakespeare” – a mismanaged chaos that matches Horatio’s summary of the plot at the end of Hamlet, when he reflects on “accidental judgments, casual slaughters” and “purposes mistook”. History, while you’re living through it, doesn’t have the cyclical predictability discerned by Marxists; like Shakespeare’s plays, it is a melee of upsets and reversals, driven by capricious individuals whose actions seldom turn out as they are supposed to do.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Orsns2
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more